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Wither, women's basketball program?

It was another bad year for the women's basketball team -- one in a long series of bad years.

Courtesy of CSUN Sports Information Dept.

As the NCAA Tournament gets underway, thoughts return to the magical year of 1998-99, when the first CSUN team made the NCAAs.

The women's team, that is.

Led by Edniesha Curry, the Lady Matadors won the Big Sky Conference and finished 21-8. Frozena Jerro, who became coach after Michael Abraham was arrested in a crack cocaine conspiracy before the season started, lost the interim label, and the team gave Colorado State a fight before succumbing.

Since attaining that peak, it has been almost all downhill since. Curry, who had demanded Jerro become head coach or she would leave, quit the team the next season for personal reasons and trasnferred to Oregon. Northridge ended 18-10. Curry later briefly played in the WNBA for the Los Angeles Sparks.

The next season, Jerro was gone, having resigned five games into the season amid accusations of inappropriate contact with players. Since then, according to her Linkedin.com profile, she has been an assistant coach at UNLV and West Los Angeles College before her current gig as New Jersey Institute of Technology assistant coach, where she has been since June.

As for CSUN, assistant coaches Paula Nirschl-Montgomery and Ken Turner took over and guided the team as best they could. But, having covered the team that year, it was clear to me that they were overmatched, and the Lady Matadors finished 2-24.

Since then, Tammy Holder won 27 games in three seasons, and Staci Schulz went 36-109 in her five seasons before being fired March 12, Athletic Director Rick Mazzuto saying the program needs to go in another direction.

Go back through the years and one will see the program always has been this bad. It's a combined 137-385 in its 20-year Division I incarnation (.262) with exactly three winning seasons and one .500 year.

Contrast that to Division II: Eight winning seasons and one .500 year between 1974-89 and an overall record of 207-166 (.555).

You think playing in a glorified high school gym affects men's basketball recruiting? Try building a downtrodden women's program with these facilities.

Athletic Director Mazzuto: Any direction you go will be better. Unless it's downward. Since this is Northridge, that remains a possibility.

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Comments

Dylan Boggs, Riverside High School Sports Examiner4 years ago

CSUN can definitely go down further... like if they end up with another crack dealer as coach.

In defense of Tammy Holder, it took her a couple years to rebuild the program and it was going in the right direction. She won Big West Coach of the Year in her final season and parlayed it into an assistant coach position at South Carolina. Schulz underachieved with the players Holder left behind and the players she recruited on her own were not capable of playing Division I ball.

Holder had never heard of CSUN before applying for the job. Hopefully that repeats itself, because any qualified coach who has heard of CSUN wouldn't want to coach here.

I was the Administrative Assistant for the Women's Basketball team during the magical tournament season and two seasons after that. Despite the turmoil that occured that seaosn, those young women played fantastic. I wish one day in the near future that team can reunite, and be honored by Cal State Northridge.

Seventeen years as a sports writer, including seven at the Los Angeles Daily News and five at Associated Press, he covered it all. He found the angles and the creative outlets to tell the stories and find the truths. As a Cal State Northridge graduate, he is uniquely qualified to follow and comment on the Matadors. Contact Lee.